This July 2008 file photo shows English graphic designer Storm Thorgerson standing next to his album cover artwork for Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon." He died Thursday at age 69. (Yui Mok/AP)

By Raphael SatterApril 19, 2013

Storm Thorgerson, a British graphic designer whose eye-popping album art for Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin encapsulated the spirit of 1970s psychedelia, died April 18. He was 69.

A family statement provided few details, but Mr. Thorgerson had been in poor health since suffering a stroke in 2003.

Even those who not familiar with Mr. Thorgerson’s name have seen his work gracing vinyl collections and CD racks. He was best known for his surreal Pink Floyd covers, which guitarist David Gilmour said had long been “an inseparable part of our work.”

Some of Mr. Thorgerson’s covers — the disturbing image of a burning man in a business suit featured on Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” or the stark prism on the band’s “Dark Side of the Moon” — have become visual icons in their own right.

Mr. Thorgerson also designed covers for Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel, Phish, Styx and Muse. His art tended toward the unsettling or the bizarre. One particularly weird CD cover — for the Cranberries’ “Bury the Hatchet” — featured a monstrous, disembodied eye staring at a crouching, naked figure in a desert.

Mr. Thorgerson described his work as a kind of fantasy job — in both senses of the word.

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Notable deaths of 2013

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A look at those who died last year.

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A look at those who died last year.

James AveryActor James Avery, best known for playing Uncle Phil on the 1990s sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” died in Los Angeles on Dec. 31. He was 65.Jason Merritt/Getty Images